Junkless
by CasXxGrippedXxMeXxTight
Summary: In which, there is nothing to do to pass the time in a motel that should have negative stars except watch Dr. Sexy MD, Dean wants to do taxes, and Cas is junkless. What else is new?


Junkless

The glare of florescent lighting made Dean's skin look yellow in front of the bathroom mirror, a kind of off-color strangeness that made him think of half-healed bruises and reruns of _The Simpsons _playing an infinite loop between Super Eights and Easy Seven's. He washed his face slowly, dirt smearing from the water, holding on to the rough stubble of his jaw.

"Hello, Dean."

For his part, Dean didn't jump, only inhaled sharply around the water cupped in his hands. Coughing violently, his body shaking with it, he turned, slightly red eyes tracing Castiel's stoic form as if checking for damage.

Immaculate in all but his wind-swept hair and rumpled clothing, Cas stared back impassively.

"What?"

"I've been told it is custom to return the niceties of greeting."

That was how Cas told him he was being rude, the same impassive face and bottomless eyes, stiff back and careful form of words as they passed his lips.

"Hi, Cas," Dean responded, long suffering and weary, like he was acknowledging an introduction at a group therapy session.

Cas smirked, the barest flicker of amusement dancing across his face in the same fast shadow his wings presented in certain light, when they twitched in anticipation of a flight, just before Castiel blinked out of existence to the symphony of wing beats.

"I am afraid the most recent hunt will attract the attention of the angels."

"Why? It was just a werewolf."

Sometimes he hated that that sentence could be accurately applied to his life.

He would take a were over almost anything nowadays, take the jutting bones and peeled flesh the transformation took, the nearly blinding way people couldn't see what they became in the cover of darkness, didn't feel their own bodies reforming.

Sometimes he wanted to do taxes. Something mundane and boring and time consuming and so—

human.

He wondered if Cas felt like that; for all the distance he painted on his face, the emotions were so much closer. Dean could tell.

"In a densely populated area. You were caught on tape several times."

Dean knew that, had seen the red lights blink at him from behind the wheel of the Impala, time slipping through his fingers and he couldn't afford to slow down, to stop for a law that wouldn't understand his urgency.

The moon had been rising, then.

"Angels monitor traffic cams? What? YouTube?" Dean asked, more than a sprinkling of tongue and cheek to compensate for the sound of a howl in the back of his head.

"Frequently. We have grown used to watching."

Something in Cas' voice was soft, there, rounded on the edges of all his clipped words and those were the moments Dean thought of him as human.

"Don't include yourself in that. You had no idea what the internet even was until I taught you about porn," Dean said airily, swiping a hand through wet hair, and smirking, a quirk of his lips at the corners.

"You promised to never discuss that."

He had, laughing around the unadulterated shock seeping from Cas in waves of confusion and disgust. Dean had expected anything, readied himself to be hit or lectured at or for Cas to just leave in that discomforted flurry he always did when the moments got too thick for him to muddle through. Instead, the angel had turned to him, his nose wrinkled like a small child at the smell of vegetables and said '_Is her father absent too?'_

Dean tried not to smile as he met the angel's eyes, caught halfway between memory and the present and suffocating a chuckle that would only heighten the indignation flashing behind Castiel's blank expression. Instead he held his hands up in surrender, grinning. He couldn't help it.

"Sorry!"

He wasn't.

"I have decided to remain here for the night to be sure there is no attack," Cas continued on as if there had been no tangent in their conversation, soldiering through.

"As long as you don't decide to creep into my bed in the middle of the night, I don't care."

"I require no such rest."

"So you've pointed out."

Water trailed its soft paths down the side of Dean's neck, like the cool press of fingertips there in the shadowed hall of a bar with too many touchy women turned desperate from the cold outside. For a moment, he wanted to shiver, to let the feeling crawl up the back of his spine and remind him that he was human, still capable of enjoying the little things.

He rubbed at the back of his neck, gathering droplets in his palm.

"Where is Sam?"Cas asked with careful enunciation, like a foreigner afraid to slip back into his native language. Dean noticed he got like that when he was uncomfortable, like a thirteen-year-old confronted with the Talk.

"Food. He didn't want Chinese, went to some girly café," Dean said, blasé and collected as he breezed past the stoic angel and into the motel room.

He made a face, green eyes casting over threadbare sheets and a television that only got one channel, mirror on the ceiling and a stain in the corner that could be any manner of bodily fluid.

This was not the best place they had stayed.

"Oh," Cas answered, into the near-silence that had consumed them for a moment, counted out by the slightly off-rhythm pounding of a headboard against the thin walls two rooms down. Not loud enough to take up all the space in their seedy room, just enough to hear.

"Where did you think he was? A den of iniquity?" Dean questioned with a smirk, reading the discomfort resting just behind the sky in Castiel's eyes.

"I don't attribute Sam's personality to be consistent with those who frequent such places," Cas replied with utter sincerity, face the flat line of a heartbeat.

"But you do mine? That's not fair. I'm not the _only_ horn dog in our family!" Dean sputtered, raising a hand to his heart in mock hurt. "How'll I ever survive knowing my angel thinks I'm no better than a prostitute?" He added with a grin as he flopped down onto his bed, his muscles protesting the strange sagging, soft in some places, harder in others, the sheets slightly crusty beneath his fingertips.

"You are the only one intent on expressing it so frequently."

"Don't be jealous of my sexual prowess, junkless," Dean quipped easily, lolling his head to grin lazily up at Castiel, now standing at the foot of the bed with the same square shoulders and misplaced look, like a child who'd lost a parent in the store, and had to wander the aisles trying to keep calm while harboring the fear they'd been kidnapped while you were looking for Coco Puffs.

"I have told you before. I am not 'junkless'."

Cas still felt the need to defend himself, though Sam had tried to explain that it was only Dean being Dean and the movie _Dogma _hadn't helped that particular notion about angels.

"Whatever helps you sleep at night."

"I do not sleep at night," Cas answered, cocking his head to the side with eyes slightly narrowed. Dean already knew that.

"It's an expression."

"Oh."

Dean reached blindly to his left until his fingers brushed against the remote. He snagged it, tossing it gently into the air and catching it on a spin down with the deft ease of someone used to catching more dangerous things, all sharp edges and the heavy weight of ammunition.

"Don't just stand there, man, you look like a kicked puppy. Sit down and watch Dr. Sexy MD," he said casually.

"I am not an animal," Cas protested, but he sat, perched on the edge of the bed as if the surface offended him. He looked like a china doll, one Dean could accidentally push from his corner of the world and shatter in the landing.

"Puppy," he returned, instead of thinking, wondering if he was leading Cas the right way, taking him down the right paths of right and wrong.

"I am-"

"An Angel of the Lord, I know _I know_. Jeez."

"You could stand to be reminded," Cas said in his same endlessly deep monotone, but Dean thought he heard a smile around the edges of it. He looked, a half curl-up that threatened bruised ribs, but the angel's face was blank.

That bastard.

"Was that humor? Did I just hear some _humor _from that voice of yours?" Dean asked, egging him on, trying to drag a smile out of the stoic man.

"I don't know, did you?" Cas returned airily, staring at the television without really seeing it.

"You're learning fast. Soon you'll fully master the language of sarcasm," Dean said like a proud parent, thinking over the early days, when half of what Dean said must have gone over his head and the head-tilt was one of the only proof he had that Castiel could move at all.

"I can only hope to one day live up to your prime example."

"Bravo." And he meant it.

"Thank you."

Cas sounded like he did too.

They watched in silence for a moment, as Doctor Sexy was harassed by that red-head bitch nurse that cheated on him with the loser who performed the heart surgery that killed sweet orderly's niece.

"Why do people watch television?" Cas sounded confused again, his voice laced with just the barest hint of irritation at the plot that obviously confounded him.

"Why not?" Dean asked, staring around the room for anything else to occupy his time. After hours of driving, running for his life, and saving the day, he didn't have the energy to read or bar hop, or anything else even remotely interesting.

"Watching arouses in people an emotional response, but instead of choosing to seek it in real life, they only tune in next week. Why not spend time fulfilling that arousal?"

"That's what she said," Dean blurted, unable to hold back the ridiculously tempting joke, and burst into laughter a moment later, shaking with it, a hand rising to slam over his mouth, as if to catch it in the palm of his hand.

"Who's she?"

"Another expression," Dean said around a final chuckle, dying into silence, and he wondered if Cas would ever join him in it.

"Oh." This 'oh' was sharper than the rest, as if he felt he was being laughed at.

"Yeah," Dean said lamely, laughter stopped in his chest, staring back at the television.

"Why on earth is he wearing cowboy boots in a hospital?" Castiel asked suddenly, hurt eradicated from his tone and replaced by something remarkably close to exasperation. Dean supposed he was lost, trying to make sense of all the people in the world, trying to learn the way all of them thought, why they did the things they did.

"It's part of what makes him sexy," Dean answered, as if the answer was obvious. Which it was.

"I don't find him sexy," Castiel pointed out, as if he needed to voice that. Which he didn't.

"I'm like sixty seven percent sure you're asexual."

"What's the other thirty three percent?" Castiel asked instead of commenting on Dean's dry tone.

"That you're so virginal the thought of being attracted to anyone is scarier than the End of Days," he said, and maybe his voice had a bit too much truth in it, not enough sarcasm. He flicked his eyes to Castiel's and found them crumpled in a frown. Dean smiled, all snark, and tipped his head up to stare at himself in the mirror-ceiling. "Also that you're junkless."

"I'm not junkless, Dean!" Castiel practically whined, and yes, that was definitely a smile in his voice.

"Shh, I'm watching Dr. Sexy," Dean hushed him, as if speaking to a small child who was interrupting important conversation.

And though the other bed was empty, and the spaces between him and his brother seemed to be yawning like some lazy Hellhound, Dean was happy.

"But-"

"Shh."

End


End file.
